Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

wiredmikey writes "Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced a highly available and scalable Domain Name System service designed to give developers and businesses a reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications. The service, 'Route 53,' effectively connects user requests to infrastructure running in AWS — such as an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud instance, an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer, or an Amazon Simple Storage Service bucket — and can also be used to route users to infrastructure outside of AWS."

I really don't see anything wrong with Amazon's response - they got a complaint, checked on it, and it violated their terms of service. Remember that that wikileaks is hosting STOLEN US PROPERTY, and as much as it is fun to read about it, it was illegally obtained - if this were a pirated software site, we wouldn't blink twice if the DNS provider refused them service.

when was that ever proven in court? What was stolen? Those diplomatic cables were never "exclusive US ownership" - by definition, they are owned by the citizens of the united states, not the government - We pay for these diplos with tax money. Have you ever heard of prior restraint?

oh right, never proven to be illegal or stolen. good job making that leap there, fyi.

Legally, Wikileaks' action is likely protected under the First Amendment. In 1971, the Supreme Court ruled (New York Times v. U.S) that the First Amendment barred the Nixon administration from keeping the New York Times and Washington Post from publishing illegally leaked information related to the Vietnam War. Two other cases (Landmark Communications v. Virginia and Bartnicki v. Vopper) support the view that it is not illegal to publish leaked information, even if the original leaking of that information w

It hasn't been "deemed illegal by the US government". That requires a court decision, and the government attorneys haven't even filed charges yet. People are innocent until proven guilty, facts are not established until proven in court. There most certainly are plenty of disputes about whether the publications were legal, on several different bases. But even if it were an "open and shut case", that still requires that the case be opened and then shut, which it hasn't.

Without that due process, Amazon can decide for any reason, like some Senator whining about some bad press, that content or services must be shut down. Due process is important, as is protection from arbitrary denials of services that are paid for and expected to critically support a business operation.

1: What I posted replies to the comment asserting that "the US government deemed Wikileaks' content illegal". Amazon's given reasons are totally irrelevant to the fact that the government has not "deemed" that, as I detailed.

2: Amazon's claims are also not believable. Specifically Amazon says Wikileaks has released 250,000 classified documents, though Wikileaks has released only about 270. There is little evidence that human rights orgs are the ones whose complaints Amazon is acting on. Those excuses are a

I believe it had little to do with the actual content, and a lot to do with having a massive DDoS launched against whoever was hosting Wikileaks. Why take on a client like Wikileaks when you could host another client that doesn't have someone using up GBs of bandwidth a second in dropped packets?

But it sure is a golden marketing moment. I'm an AWS customer (we do huge enterprise hosting environments that integrate with AWS) and I'd had been impressed with them had they said "10GBps of DDOS traffic? Pfffft. Our anycasted infrastructure easily shrugs that off." Now, they look bad in both technical and political circles (at least to those who believe in freedom of speech for those not accused or convicted of a crime).

If you reasonably believe you will be able to collect the costs of bandwidth from the AWS customer that was chewed up by the DDOS, I don't see what difference it makes whether the bandwidth was legitimate or not. I'm not in a market where these decisions are made so I may be way off, but I considered AWS to be an interesting tool against DDOS because you could theoretically ramp up to overcome the attack. Apparently not.

I've been looking for a new DNS host. And it's funny, I actually clicked on this story thinking I'd get to read some informed comments about the pluses and minuses of Amazon's new service from people who would know.

Amazon "cloud" hosting services - popular with geeks, used by employed developers everywhere.

I'm a huge fan (in general) of Amazon. Spent more money there than I care to think on. That's irrelevant. The/. story was either a verbatim PR release or written by a PR stooge to be as banal and self-aggrandizing as possible. It wasn't intended to spur discussion but to advertise a product. The submission was obviously not along the lines of "Hey guys, here's a new DNS host, what do you think will be the advantages and disadvantages compared to OpenDNS et al?" That's fine, great, if you want to adve

Hmm. Okay. You may be right. The overall good-vs-evil tone of the conversation and wikileaks fixation so irked me that I kind of glossed over this.

On the other hand, if a major tech vendor releases a new service that may be something newsworthy. No? Do we not consider it news when apple or google do something new? Should we? (Maybe I don't know the answer to that!)

I guess I clicked on the story kind of hoping to find out what slashdotters think about the new service. To find out if there is anything co

Now when we talk about Amazon, we immediately think about the wikileaks debacle. I wonder if this is only because we follow geek news or if the mainstream knows about it. In which case the call to boycott amazon for christmas maybe very effective.

In reality, boycotts are rarely effective. Especially against a giant corporation like Amazon. Do you think 90% of your average consumers know or care about Wikileaks? And if they do know, are they willing to spend more money at another site just to make a political statement? I think you over estimate greatly the intelligence and resolve of the average internet consumer.

Things don't always cost more at other sites. For instance, a new Xbox game at Amazon is the same price as a new Xbox game at Newegg. I buy from Amazon out of familiarity and habit. It's my default. I kind of hope Amazon suffers because of their behavior over this. And certainly I would never, ever use EasyDNS after this. You'd have to be crazy to.

I believe more in the apathy and ignorance of consumers than I do in consumers making informed purchases based on their beliefs. If people in the US were really that conscientious of their shopping choices, how can places like Wal-Mart thrive? Sure they may have the lowest prices, but what are the real costs when 80% of your products are made in China?

yeah - I switched my mom from Comcast to google DNS (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) when she couldn't get through to support - I wasn't near a computer at the time and I remembered that one off the top of my head.

I have to agree. I evaluated using AWS for some production systems and it's horrible (it felt like it was still in a beta test stage). I would have assumed that the most user requested feature would have been to offer up-to-date server images running on their EBS (non-ephemeral) storage or at least provide a supported method for migrating server images from the instance-based storage to the permanent storage.

I guess you didn't understand. Try to actually google "wikileaks" right now. Take a look at the result. Google is managing where Amazon failed. And I doubt US govt. can actually do anything about this.

Spinelessly caving in to secret threats from a fascist individual amounts to playing with your constitutional rights and deserves to be derided. People would not have been hard at all on Amazon if they were responding to a formal legal notice from government, based on a properly adjudicated case.

Whether there is or not a US company that can take on the US government is irrelevant to the result. Any company that does what Amazon did must be and will be hauled up by the people.

My point is that many of you are being too hard on Amazon. You want to fight the real fight in this then fight the government, not the businesses. Businesses make decisions based on their bottom line (most of the time) so will "cave" as you say on what they perceive as a threat to it.

Beat up the government or those in it that make these kinds of threats and/or decisions. Simply put, yelling at the companies for doing what the government tell them to do will get you nowhere (or at least close enough to it

The biggest reason I can think of for using an alternative DNS is independence from governments. Since Amazon clearly bows to US government pressure and removed wikileaks [pcworld.com] I see it as a failure on this front.

No, that's not what I meant. You and the GP are talking about distributed DNS that a client uses. For example, at home I use my ISP's DNS servers. This is what we want alternative DNS for, and I don't disagree with you. However, Amazon's service is for DNS nameservers. When I own a domain, I point the nameservers at ns1.example.com, ns2.example.com, which officially say that example.com points at 192.168.1.1. This is the service Amazon is hosting. You could do this at several places, but instead of hosting

When they fought the one click patent war and bragged otherwise, started publishing stats on what their.com customers were buying, and laughed at my privacy complaint (I have my own.com domain), I dropped them and found that almost everything they have, I can get cheaper elsewhere.

They keep on pulling shenanigans like caving to the government over wikileaks, one excuse after another for being craven cowards and bullies, and I continue to wonder why people trust them.

Hahahaha! Really, Amazon... *breathless* This is a really good practical joke, seriously. You boot sites from your cloud when someone tells you to and now you want people to trust your DNS!
Oh, and yesterday I cancelled my PayPal & Amazon accounts. Keep up the good job! Now we see the true colors of these companies (until now, they were just an educated guess).
We see what you did there, Amazon. We all know it. Shame on you.

Say whatever you want. I know I'm insignificant to them, but I felt the need to do something for a change. I'm not the only one. There's also the bad PR. And no, I never completely believed Google's motto. Just look at what they're planning for wireless internet: the end of net neutrality. All companies are evil, some are less evil than others. Have a nice time being cynical and doing nothing. That's why we can't have nice things.

Oh, I agree that doing it makes you feel better, and it's harmless. It's just not a very effective riposte.

On most tech related issues the large mass of people are not only going to do nothing but aren't even going to be cynical about it.

Unless it can be made to connect to them in a way they feel, why should they? Example: I can get all worked up over funding for some esoteric physics research that will have a good effect, but most people will have no idea about it. To expect them to pick up that torch is u

I think Amazon would be happy about you closing an account with PayPal - one of their competitors.

This is more likely something aimed at the happy customers of amazon's cloud services - not places like wikileaks that could pose a serious legal risk for amazon to be hosting. Those happy customers will be happy to trust this DNS service. Sites like wikileaks probably won't trust ANY provider to begin with.

after they kicked off wikileaks, like spineless, witless cowards after pressure from some fatass u.s. senator, and lied about it. thankfully easydns directly told what happened to them so that we know precisely who amazon caved in to.

if i was amazon, that would change my choice. because, i am told i was living in a country that had freedoms. in addition, despite justice in america requires a lot of money, if i was amazon, i would have enough money to afford an army of lawyers to sue and participate in court cases on my behalf.

so, all it depends would be the spine factor involved. amazon didnt have spine. facebook also got threatened, but they showed more spine than amazon. and they arent as rich yet.

All about the bottom line. If Amazon had refused, Fox News, CNN, and all the other government-loving propaganda channels would smear them with so much shit that Amazon would start losing the Sarah Palin-loving "real American" costumer base (didn't her book make it to #1 on Amazon?) and even more than just that customers, since a high percentage of Americans think WikiLeaks is a criminal organisation and Assange should be assassinated without trial, because "We are the United States of America, and when we d

in soviet union, you, me, actually any citizen had not only the right, but also the possibility to get elected and rise to high ranks in government through democratic process. you didnt need money to mount election campaigns.

in america, if you arent rich, you cant use your right to get elected.

Not sure why you'd single out Amazon for this. Wikileaks violated their ToS. Any provider will kick you off if you violate their ToS, Amazon just gets the flack because they actually had a high-profile customer that they dropped. It should be taken as a danger of relying on 'the cloud' (i.e. letting someone else control your important infrastructure), rather than specific evidence that Amazon is evil.

Remember boys and girls, putting stuff in the cloud means giving someone else control over the off switch.

And yet despite your smartass reply, Amazon--including S3, EC2 and their other hosting-related features--are making money hand over fist. Have you investigated the possibility that Slashdot is, you know, not a great indicator of mainstream opinion?

If I were going to host a website in the cloud that leaked classified government documents, I would not use Amazon. For just about any other purpose where cloud hosting was appropriate to begin with, I would continue to consider them in exactly the same way as

Many picture print services have an anti-blasphemy clause in their ToS. Does that mean, they won't let me print pictures of a bearded guy wearing a turban? Probably not, because Lieberman won't threaten them over that. But it still shouldn't be in their ToS.

The proper way to handle things like Wikileaks would be a court order - expressing the will of the people, open to a legal counter-challenge, and a democratic discussion process.

After the way Amazon.com rolled over on Wikileaks, kicking them off their servers, I don't know why anyone would bother with Amazon. They just rolled over instantly and did not even put up a fight.
Julian Assange is the best friend Democracy has. All these so-called news organizations, with their bloated budgets, failed to unearth any of this stuff. To keep their precious "access" the modern TV newsreader does no investigation at all. Instead, we get celebrity news...

If you ever plan to motor west,
Travel my way, take the highway that is best.
Get your kicks on route sixty-six.
It winds from Chicago to LA,
More than two thousand miles all the way.
Get your kicks on route sixty-six.
Now you go through Saint Louis
Joplin, Missouri,
And Oklahoma City is mighty pretty.
You see Amarillo,
Gallup, New Mexico,
Flagstaff, Arizona.
Don't forget Winona,
Kingman, Barstow, San Bernadino.
Won't you get hip to this timely tip:
When you make that California trip
Get your kicks on ro

No more trusting amazon for web services. If they can't sustain the DOS (political), how can we trust? Lean from Wikileaks.

Ok, let's see what we can learn from Wikileaks. To me it sounds like we learned that if you violate the Terms of Use of an ISP, then you lose your website. But I think that you learned that Amazon is bad and some other ISP would have acted differently.

I'll make a deal with you - identify a single ISP within the USA that would be willing to host Wikileaks content at around the same price point as Amazon EC2 (i.e. less than $200/month) and I'll buy the webhosting and mirror the Wikileaks site. If you think

I normally wouldn't take issue to this, however their wording and context makes it sound like people will be able to see updates within 60 seconds. While it may update on their end within 60 seconds, after your DNS Servers cache, operating system's cache and the browsers cache, you are looking at atleast an hour depending on what setup you have. Fix it Amazon.

What is wrong with what they wrote? Route 53 isn't designed for end users who don't understand all of the caching points of DNS entries -- if I swing my DNS entry to point to another server IP, based on what they wrote, I know that within 60 seconds I'll start to see clients hitting that new server. And I know that I'll still see lingering hits at the old IP even after 24 hours.

Amazon has no control over client side caching -- TTL is advisory, not mandatory.